Sonic’s Actual First Home Appearance Discovered By Guru Larry

So it turns out that Sonic appeared in another game aside from Rad Mobile before he’d star in his own game. Youtube personality Guru Larry found out that his first appearance was actually in the incredibly obscure Amiga game The Adventures of Quik & Silva. The game was developed by Factor 5 under the pseudonym New Bits on the Ram, and included lots of copyrighted characters as enemies. One of those enemies being Sonic, which the developers seemingly based on pre-release screenshots.

The game was first released as a cover disc in the UK with issue #5 of Amiga Fun on May 10th, 1991. Almost a month before Sonic the Hedgehog would be released on the Genesis. Be sure to watch Guru Larry’s video about this if you want to know the full details.

Update: Twitter user @UltimateDSman pointed out that TheTetrahedronVG actually made a video about this. And so he did, back in 2011. That being said, Guru Larry does provide a lot more info, making it still worth watching if you already knew about this.

5 Comments

Very solid except for one thing that’s bugging me – where’d he get the European release date for the original Sonic game? Last I checked, even Sega thinks it was simultaneous with the North American release, not sometime between the North American and Japanese releases.

Update: The North American version was indeed released first and not at the same time. Check out these magazine articles (http://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_%2816-bit%29_magazine_articles) – one of them specifically mentions July and certain retailers importing the US release before the European date. Guru Larry’s “July 12” sounds right since there’s no mention of Japanese import. Someone must inform the rest of the Internet!

Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t Sonic Eraser released before Sonic 1, making it the first game to feature Sonic ever released? I don’t remember where I read this back in the early 2000’s so it could be wrong.